Samsung lays down PCIe server flash gauntlet

Are you listening, SanDisk?

Faster, fatter flash cards that speed up server applications are in demand, and Samsung has announced it is mass-producing a 3.2TB NVMe PCIe SSD using its 3D V-NAND technology. It says higher capacities are coming.

It delivered up to 740,000 4K IOPS and had a 3GB/sec read bandwidth. The SM1715 does up to 750,000/130,000 random read/write IOPS (block size unknown, thought to be 4K) and has a 3GB/sec read bandwidth and 2.2GB/sec write bandwidth. Samsung will be releasing more product information soon.

The endurance is 10 full drive writes a day for five years and the targeted hosts for this half-height, half-length card are high-end enterprise servers.

Samsung SM1715 3D V-NAND NVMe PCIe SSD - we love initials

How does this 3D V-NAND product stack up (sorry) against other PCIe flash cards?

It isn't a leader in the capacity stakes. HGST's FlashMax II runs up to 4.8TB but it doesn't perform as well - 269,000/51,000 random read/write IOPS and 2.6/0.9 GB/sec read/write. HGST has its newer FlashMax II cards that go faster, 531,000 random read O+IOPS for example, but top out at 2.2TB.

SanDisk (Fusion-io) has a 2.4TB ioDrive 2 Duo doing 700,000 random read IOPS with 512-byte blocks and 3GB/sec sequential read and write. The Atomic SX300 goes up to 6.4TB, but is slower but more balanced than Samsung's speedster at 215,000/300,000 random read/write IOPS.